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Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

markpitblado.me

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Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#111

Post by x0x0 »

tclancy wrote: post #22
carlosjobim wrote: post #10

"it’s now easier than ever" Followed by 300 lines of obscure config commands and server configuration. Great... My solution: I connect my iPhone once or twice a year and import my photos to a folder on my hard drive. Then I delete the old photos from the phone. That has worked fine for a couple of decades now. Or you can use iCloud or Google Photos, which is about one dollar per month.

Horses for courses, but you’re comparing your best-case scenario to a worst-case Immich scenario. Admittedly I had a home lab box for it and am technical, but my effort was essentially pointing Claude at the Docker image and remembering a port number for setting up my phone. Your solution, as presented, assumes you don’t lose any photos in six months and never go above the 2gb or so of space you get for a dollar. The…

Google sells 100 gi for $2/mo. So it's a lot more than 2g.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#112

Post by sylens »

bilalq wrote: post #73
drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday. I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.

Just run both Google Photos and Immich on your phone. Open Immich once a week to sync all your recently taken photos.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#113

Post by Arya_xiaofan »

bix6 wrote: post #12

I’m currently using Photos Mobile with Synology but planning to setup Immich soon. The article doesn’t cover sharing which is the one hiccup in all this. Apple makes it so easy to share galleries and I don’t want to expose my NAS. Cost wise it’s close to parity if you backup offsite. But worth it to move out of their ecosystem. I literally did not have some of my original files since apple shifts things off disk to p…

[dead]

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#114

Post by hakcermani »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

Had gazillion copies of folders and iphoto libraries in various backups, but since i moved to linux as daily driver was on the hunt for a good photo archiver. Just recently started using Immich. Tried Photoprism too which would have also fit my need well, but somehow Immich won the coin toss ! (After many years was able to pull that one pic my wife was after from my archive !). My all those duplicates have been now been pulled and deduped and condensed into an immich library.

I used to want people to send me full res pics by email to preserve location and find my people easily, but Immich does such a good job with face identification that i stopped worring about what people send me over whatsapp (at least I can find all photos of any one person going back to the first pic i have with them !, my own pics are always geotagged).

Regardless of cloud versions for sharing i need my own local backup. i run immich in docker on Ubuntu, 2 mirrored ZFS drives for redundancy and backed up to rsync.net via restic. (rsync.net i need anyways to back up other data).

Have to try the mobile app still, want to end up with a low res version of my entire library (about 1 TB) on my mobile, face tagged for easy sharing ! Thats next on the list to complete my personal photo management endeavour !

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#115

Post by drdexebtjl »

QuiEgo wrote: post #108
bilalq wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I actually love Google Photos as a product. I just want Immich as a safety net in case Google ever feels like locking me out of my account on a random Tuesday. I haven't really found a guide or discussions on how best to use Immich in this mirroring way. Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard. Setting up Immich is something that's been on my todo list for years now.

You can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.

Just use LUKS, eCryptfs, or ZFS encryption. It’s not the application’s job to do encryption at rest, it’s the filesystem’s.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#116

Post by crossroadsguy »

Noaidi wrote: post #39
drdexebtjl wrote: post #30

I use Immich, but saved me money it has not. Unless you actually go through the "Backing up your photos" step, you _will_ lose your photos, it's just a matter of time. And if you're like most people, that is probably not acceptable. And by the time you do the math for the cost of your backups, you'll find Google Photos pricing is actually pretty good. Still worth it, imo.

I was in a paranoid psychotic state a few months back and I delete my whole photo library. About 40GB or my life for the last 15 years. Looking back now it is no big deal. My burden has lessened and i am still the same man I was.

Exactly. Though when something similar happened to me, and I was able to salvage most of it, the next thing I did was:

discard/reject/delete: ≈400GB → 25GB → 3GB (and since then I have been backing up starting from that 3GB set which, more than a decade later, is obviously more now, but the learning was don't let amount of data control/tame you, it should be the other way round. So I can just use multiple PAYG backup destinations without worrying about insane costs.

The amount of photos and videos I took also went astronomically down after that. I realised what I was missing - I had lost the data and for the most part I didn't have many of those scenes/moments to begin with. Because I was busy taking those digital photos and videos.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#117

Post by nilleo »

My primary use case for Immich is not as a Google Photos replacement, but as a backup of my photos that are on Google Photos. With all the horror stories in the past of folks getting locked out of their Google accounts (and this all Google services) for misunderstandings without a successful appeal, I don't want to risk losing all of my memories just because Google decided that they needed to lock my account for some reason or another. I'll trust that Google won't lose my data but I don't trust that they will continue to let me access it indefinitely.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#118

Post by miladyincontrol »

I mean I have dozens of TBs of raw photos, google photos or icloud simply arent an option.

And the thing I particularly enjoy about immich is that it's semantic searching is leagues better than any of the proprietary solutions in a lot of use cases. Particularly it works amazing for various brands and IP that 'cloud' offerings simply wont recognize.

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#119

Post by joshspankit »

I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things).

I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier.

I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, process, suggest relationships

Re: Saving money on Google Photos with Immich: Your own personal photo storage

#120

Post by QuiEgo »

drdexebtjl wrote: post #115
QuiEgo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use https://www.photosync-app.com/home if all you want is a local backup. It has a killer feature Immich is still missing: encryption at rest of the photos.

Just use LUKS, eCryptfs, or ZFS encryption. It’s not the application’s job to do encryption at rest, it’s the filesystem’s.

I personally find it nicer to unlock my phone to decrypt (Face ID) then dealing with having to auth with my headless server. Is there a way to manage this without putting the keys for LUKS or similar somewhere risky? Main threat is someone stealing the NAS during a break in.
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